What is a Good Life? #186
Self-Sovereignty, Surveillance, and the Body as Art with OONA
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around what actually matters. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week, I’m reflecting on a conversation with OONA – an anonymous performance artist known for her works Milking The Artist, Dear David, and Look Touch Own. We discuss data, extraction, the body as art, and what sovereignty means through physical, digital, and spiritual lenses. This was a really thought provoking and stirring conversation that left me optimistic about finding connection and intimacy in the places we'd least expect it.
If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
Do you ever get the feeling that we are valuing the wrong things? Valuing more what can be measured while discounting the significance of what we can’t measure so easily.
In this week’s interview, OONA gives the example of an apartment building or a hotel trimming the bottom line of a business by firing the doorman but not accounting for all the intangibles that would be lost from all the interactions the residents or guests would have with that person.
It made me think of a past interview I had with Madelaine Ley. She was recalling the difficulty she experienced when trying to get funding for a charity she was working with:
“We want to be able to put things on a graph, on a slide, at a board meeting. I’ve been writing a lot of these grant proposals for these boarding homes and I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Just how could you measure the profound gift of a birthday cake to someone whose birthday had been forgotten for 20 years? And then you brought their birthday cake.
Or fixing somebody’s guitar who hadn’t been able to play and couldn’t get their guitar fixed for years because they couldn’t afford the $20 repair. And now they could finally play.”
Throughout all these 300+ interviews I am conducting, I have become increasingly aware that there is a considerable gap between what we have been programmed to think will yield a good life and the experience of one.
A past guest alluded to the significance of the cultural scripts we follow, while another pointed to the influence of the advertising industry in cultivating an image that doesn’t match up with how we feel in this life.
Both are powerful influences in us no longer thinking or deciding for ourselves.
Yet I am continuously heartened by how people respond to this question of a good life when you give people a moment to reflect on their lives. In group conversations I’ve hosted on this theme, the simplicity and importance of non-quantifiable moments that bring so much meaning to people’s lives come pouring out.
“Dancing with my toddler.”
“A few glasses of wine with an old friend.”
“A hug after I lost someone close to me.”
“Growing some vegetables for the first time and harvesting them.”
Without a consistent paying attention to and appreciation of the unquantifiable and realising their significance, we can get really lost in the scripts of life we are told and what advertisers suggest.
We can almost destroy the usefulness of what can be quantified by making it the only thing we pay attention to.
I sometimes wonder why this project continues so effortlessly for me, by and large. Lord knows it is not for the money.
The connection I make with another human each week is a big part of it. So too is the act of sharing in their process of making meaning.
But most of all, it is a repeated reminder of the simplicity of what they actually feel is meaningful to them. I can’t help but be aware of the same things in my life as I go about my day-to-day tasks or when I am walking down the street.
It doesn’t sound particularly sexy or like something that will go viral – more an accumulation of drips. But it has made a profound impact on my experience of life regardless of fluctuating circumstances.
It feels like the forgotten part of life. What exists outside of the numbers. A part of life that feels rather abundant and present if we remember to notice.
I hope this newsletter and podcast can help you remember too.
2. This Week’s Questions
What do you value that rarely brings you a felt sense of value?
What has become more meaningful to you as you move through life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Self-Sovereignty, Surveillance, and the Body as Art with OONA - What is a Good Life? #186
Listen to or watch the full conversation with OONA below.
For Apple podcast click here.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.